Hardware Installation

Installation of any of the AMD Radeon cards is really easy. Once the card is seated into the PC, make sure you hook up the monitor and of course any external power connectors like 6 and/or 8-pin PEG power connectors. Preferably get yourself a power supply that has these PCIe PEG connectors native (converting them from a Molex Peripheral connector anno 2013 we feel is a no-go).

Once done, we boot into Windows, install the latest ATI Catalyst drivers and after a reboot all should be working.

Mind you though that in the Catalyst Control panel you'll need to activate Crossfire mode manually if you are using two cards. No further configuration is required or needed unless you like to tweak the settings, for which you can open the Catalyst Control Center.

If you install two cards, don't forget the Crossfire bridge. In the driver Crossfire mode should already be activated for you.

Power Consumption

Let's have a look at how much power draw we measure with this graphics card installed.

The methodology: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. We simply stress the GPU, not the processor. The before and after wattage will tell us roughly how much power a graphics card is consuming under load.

Our test system is based on a power hungry Core i7 - X79 system. This setup is overclocked to 4.60 GHz on all cores. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). On average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to higher CPU clock settings, water-cooling, additional cold cathode lights etc.

We'll be calculating the GPU power consumption here, not the total PC power consumption.

Measured power consumption - single card

System in IDLE = 100W

System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 174W

Difference (GPU load) = 74W

Add average IDLE wattage ~10W

Subjective obtained GPU power consumption = ~ 84 Watts

Measured power consumption - two cards

System in IDLE = 102W

System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 245W

Difference (GPU load) = 143W

Add average IDLE wattage ~20W

Subjective obtained GPU power consumption = ~ 163 Watts

Mind you that the system wattage is measured at the wall socket side and there are other variables like PSU power efficiency. So this is a calculated value, albeit a very good one.

Above, we have a chart of relative power consumption. Again the Wattage shown is the card with the GPU(s) stressed 100%, showing only the peak GPU power draw, not the power consumption of the entire PC and not the average gaming power consumption.

Here is Guru3D's power supply recommendation:

One card - On your average system the card requires you to have a 500 Watt power supply unit.

Two cards in Crossfire - On your average system the cards require you to have a 600 Watt power supply unit as minimum.

If you are going to overclock your GPU or processor, then we do recommend you purchase something with some more stamina.

There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load:

bad 3D performance

crashing games

spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC

freezing during gameplay

PSU overload can cause it to break down

Let's move to the next page where we'll look into GPU heat levels and noise levels coming from this graphics card.

Club3D Radeon HD 7870 Joker reviewWe test and review the Club3D Radeon HD 7870 Joker, this is the much discussed 7870 card that in fact has a 7900 series GPU, the Tahiti LE. For a fair amount of money this series 7800 product now offers 7900 series performance. Armed with 2GB of graphics memory it hits a sweet spot gaming performance wise and to date it one of the more popular products in the mainstream segment. Let's check out the Club3D Radeon HD 7870 Joker.

Club3D Radeon HD 7790 Crossfire reviewIn this article test and review the Club3D Radeon HD 7790 Crossfire incl Frametimes. If you need a little more value for money then the 13 Series R7790 might be just what you are looking for. This card is all about saving money and costs roughly 130 EUR. Have peek at our review where we'll test the 13 Series from Club3D.

Club3D Radeon HD 7850 Royal Queen reviewClub3D jumped the 7800 bandwagon as well with several models, and for this review we'll be looking at their Radeon HD 7850 Royal Queen edition which comes with 1 GB of graphics memory. The product comes default in many ways, except the cooler. Club3D uses a small PCB and pretty slim dual-slot cooler making the card very easy to install. The graphics card is equipped with one 6-pin PCIe power connector. As mentioned the card comes default/reference clocked at 860 MHz and the memory is clocked at a 4800 MHz reference as well.

Club3D Radeon HD 6870 X2 reviewWe review the Club3D Radeon HD 6870 X2. A dual-GPU Barts based graphics card. AMD had nothing to do with this design, this is a custom design product. Admittedly we just love that stuff. So we'll head over into the review, we'll cover a thing or two about BARTS based processors, have a closer look at the Club3D Radeon HD 6870 X2.